In my day Antioch College, from which I graduated in 1950, was always on the left side of the political spectrum. In the decades since that time the College moved steadily to the far-left end of the spectrum. So far left in fact that it lost most of its student body as well as most of its financial support. As a result the College actually went defunct in 2008. (I understand it hopes to be reborn again in 2012.) The experience of the college, in an odd reversed way, mirrors my own intellectual and political experience in the decades since 1950.
Like most of my fellow Antioch graduates I was not a communist, but I did think that capitalism was suspect. Profit was a bit of a dirty word and capitalism was often considered synonymous with greed. Socialism was much cooler. And the Soviet Union, if I thought about it all, was probably not all that bad either. After all, considering the way we treated Negroes and women, and the depth of poverty still prevalent in our country, we in the Unites States did not have that much to be proud of. As I remember it, some of our professors at Antioch in those days were talking about the evils of corporate capitalism and the “fascist” tilt of both democratic and republican political parties in much the same way that many leftists do today. Some professors went so far as to suggest we should consider seceding from the U.S. and form social-democratic utopian cells that somehow would protect us from the ravages of corporate tyranny.
In the first presidential election in my coming of age I voted for Harry Truman, but I was tempted to vote for the far-left candidate and fellow-traveler Henry Wallace. He was the favorite of many professors and fellow Antiochians. I emphatically did not trust “anti-communists” like the congressmen on the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) who voted to investigate Antioch the year after I graduated. And of course, I was appalled at the soon-to-be-infamous Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy. In short I guess I was in those days a (weak) fellow-traveler, a “controllable Marxist.”
Since those days, as many of you know, I have changed my views considerably and now believe that free-market capitalism is essential to democracy (though not sufficient). While greed may not be a praiseworthy virtue, a healthy self-interest, free trade, diversity of talents (and rewards) and strong profits are all good things for the individual and for the society.
It seems to me now that while social-democrats do have some good ideas, we need to be careful to keep a balance and not slide into a state where citizens become overly dependent on government largess and control. Yes, we need good government and yes government can do good things for people (like the GI Bill of Rights, social security, public schools, and civil rights legislation), but if we go too far in a socialist direction we risk losing the creative spark and dynamic economic growth that comes from competitive enterprise and vigorous competition in ideas, in science, in technology, in the arts, in communication and in religion.
Finally, I confess now that in my younger years I was very naive about that criminally- extreme version of socialism—Marxist-Leninist communism. History has clearly demonstrated how tragically disastrous that system has been wherever and whenever it has come to power.
With that personal background, here is Part 4 of WHAT’S TO BE DONE?
Part 4: Controllable Marxists:
The U.S. response to the Berlin blockade and the Korean invasion were clear-cut and successful. The U.S. responses to the Soviet use of “controllable Marxists” inside the western world were muddied, controversial and not always so successful. During the 2nd World War the Soviets were successful in repelling and destroying Hitler’s armies. They were successful also in planting spies in the US and British governments and defense industries, notably the Manhattan Project (the multi-billion dollar effort to create and deliver an atomic bomb for use in the war).
At the end of the war the US had a monopoly on atomic bomb technology. However, it turned out later that Soviet spies stole important secrets of the atomic bomb that made it easier for the Soviets to build their first nuclear weapons in 1949.
Two cases, in particular, became national scandals in the early 1950s.
Klaus Fuchs, an important British scientist working on the Manhattan Project in New Mexico confessed to stealing secrets about the detonation details of the atomic bomb and passing them along to Soviet agents in the U.S. including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The FBI intercepted some of the communications and prosecutors brought Fuchs and the Rosenbergs to trial in 1952. Fuchs pleaded guilty and in consideration of his aiding the prosecution received a sentence of 10 years in prison.
In a much publicized (and much criticized) trial both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of espionage and sentenced to death. Both were executed though many experts think the evidence was much stronger against Julius than it was against his wife Ethel. The presiding judge in Boston, Irving Kaufman, wrote that: “I consider your crime worse than murder. … I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.”
In another widely publicized and controversial trial, Alger Hiss, a senior US State Department official and important advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt during the war, was accused in 1948 of being a secret agent of the Soviet Union. He denied the accusation but was subsequently convicted of perjury in 1950 and sentenced to 5 years in prison. Hiss had many supporters in high places including Dean Acheson, Secretary of State under Harry Truman. His trial and conviction were divisive and controversial. As were a series of highly emotional hearings and investigations of communist activities in both the US Senate and House of Representatives.
In the late 40s and early 50s the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC) conducted widely publicized hearings on communism in the government, in academia and in Hollywood. These HUAC hearings ruined some careers in Hollywood when executives in the movie industry started a “blacklist” of writers, actors, directors and movie technicians who were suspected of being communists or of being sympathetic to communist activities. Some on the blacklist were active party members. Most, however, were fellow travelers, “controllable Marxists.”
Looking beyond Hollywood, the list of famous fellow travelers in the 20th century is long, surprising and sobering. It includes well-known playwrights like Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw and Clifford Odets, writers liked Dalton Trumbo, Howard Fast, Ernest Hemingway and Howard Zinn, actors like Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson and Edward G. Robinson, folk singers like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, journalists like I.F. Stone, Edgar Snow and William Shirer, philosophers like Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, scientists like Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Linus Pauling, musicians like Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, capitalists like Cyrus Eaton, Frederick Vanderbilt Field and George Soros, union leaders like Sidney Hillman, Saul Alinsky and Harry Bridges, diplomats like Joseph Davies and Alger Hiss, even a former vice-president, Henry Wallace–as well as hundreds of thousands of other intellectuals, college professors, union leaders, businessmen and socially prominent leaders.
Many of these fellow travelers (in only a few cases were they dedicated party members) got their start in the 1930s depression when it did seem to many citizens in the West that capitalism was on its death bed and that communism was the best hope for the future.
Joseph Davies, for instance, the American ambassador to Moscow during the height of Stalin’s reign of terror in the late 1930s, said of the sadistic dictator, “If Stalin had been born in America, my guess is that Stalin would have gone into public life because of his sympathy for the underprivileged and his desire to bring about a better life for the masses.”
The famous Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White went into rhapsodies of praise for the greater freedom for artists under Stalin. “This freedom to experiment—and the opportunity to experiment without worrying about the rent and the grocery bill,” she wrote, “points up, more sharply than anything else I can think of, the tremendous difference between the opportunities of the artist under a system like that in the Soviet Union and the situation here in America.”
Of course there are other explanations for the fellow-traveler naive support of communist goals and activities.
(1) The Marxist vision had strong appeal for many intellectuals in its quasi-religious hope of utopian bliss in the future. Many fellow travelers believed it was more than a hope– it was a sure thing, scientifically certified and inevitable! All this in contrast to what many saw as the exploitation, hypocrisy and misery they felt was brought on by capitalism in the depression years.
(2) It was and is easy to confuse support for communism with support for democratic social progress. Not all of the ideas of Marx and other reformers and revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries led to tyranny and brutality. Only some branches of Marxist theory—Marxist-Leninism–led to totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Other Marxist-influenced offshoots combined forces, often with religious activists, to pioneer social-democratic reform movements that are still active in improving capitalist and democratic states today.
In both the 19th and the 20th centuries, for instance, socialist and social democratic parties and movements made significant progressive changes in the industrialized democratic countries of Western Europe and North America. Union leaders like Samuel Gompers, politicians like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, African-American leaders like Martin Luther King brought ideas to democratic practice some of which were originally championed by Marxist thinkers. Ideas like universal suffrage, progressive taxation, free education, unemployment insurance, social security, civil rights laws, women’s liberation and indeed much of the modern welfare state.
In the U.S. Senate too there was a communist scare in the 1950s. A Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, got international fame (or infamy depending on your point of view) for his charge in a West Virginia speech that “I have in my hand the names of 205 (or 76, there was no written record at the speech and the number is in dispute) State Department officials who belong to the Communist Party of America.”
It turned out that his supposed list was for the most part imaginary. Even though there were indeed some communist members and many fellow-travelers in government, business, unions, academia and intellectual circles, his reckless, exaggerated and unsubstantiated charges were eventually to bring his downfall when he accused the Army of being heavily infiltrated with communist saboteurs.
As a young college graduate and teacher in the McCarthy days, like pretty much all of my friends and colleagues I was solidly anti-McCarthy. I could see that many of his accusations were based on flimsy or non-existent evidence and that they were harming innocent people. Looking back today, however, I have to admit that yes, McCarthy was an obnoxious personality who drank too much and made way too many unfounded accusations. However, I also have to admit that he was onto something real and we may find history is kinder to him than to some of his more harsh attackers like the left-wing journalist I.F. Stone or the fellow traveling playwright Lillian Hellman.
Recently translated and decoded secret Soviet transcripts, for instance, have produced solid evidence that journalist I.F. Stone may well have been a paid secret Soviet agent all the while he was leading the pack in denouncing McCarthy.
Lillian Hellman (like only too many other fellow travelers of the 30s and 40s) consistently and openly praised Stalin and even supported his “show trials” in the 1930s that did not stop at ruining a few reputations but sent most of Stalin’s revolutionary Bolshevik colleagues to a quick death (along with 3 or 4 million other unfortunates) on no evidence. Fellow writer Mary McCarthy said of Hellman’s prose: “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
Stay alert for Part 5: Khrushchev to Nixon
Note to teachers in secondary and college classrooms: please consider the new program CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY, reviewed below in School Library Journal. It is fast becoming one of our best selling programs.
Capitalism and Democracy (Democracy: The Basics Series). DVD. 50 min with tchr’s. guide, quiz. Hawkhill Assocs. 2008, 2009 release. ISBN 1-55979-222-1. $109.
Gr 9 Up—While many individuals may assume that capitalism and democracy are only possible when mated with each other, this well-crafted program presents a comprehensive examination of the relationship between the two theories. Consisting of two distinct divisions, the nicely paced and superbly narrated film reviews the historical development of both the economic theory of capitalism and the governmental concept of democracy and explains how capitalism and democracy are connected today. The historical account begins at the earliest stages of human society and smoothly progresses to today’s complex world with hints at what might occur in the future throughout the world. A rich variety of artwork, video, and photographs help illustrate the connections between capitalism and democracy and enhance the impact of the presentation. New terms are subtitled as they are introduced. There are two interactive review tools for post-viewing use. The guided questions option reviews key points to generate discussion, while the mastery quizzes focus on essential topics and themes from the program. While most teachers will find these assessment devices lacking in substance, their inclusion is a nice bonus. A valuable resource.—Dwain Thomas, formerly Lake Park High School, Roselle, IL
Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President
P.S. Once again please consider our 2010 sale. 70% discount on all DVD programs (including the one reviewed above), 90% discount on all VHS video tapes. See: www.hawkhill.com